


what you dont know youre missing can kill you too

by tendertragedies



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: 23rd Timeline (The Magicians), Canon-Typical Violence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2019-10-21 10:45:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17641280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tendertragedies/pseuds/tendertragedies
Summary: This is the twenty-third time that Jane Chatwin has tried to destroy The Beast. Despite all her past failures, she hopes that this will be the time she finally wins.What she doesn't know is how much worse certain changes can make things. What she doesn't know is that when you stop supplying the heart with enough blood, the heart begins to die.What Jane Chatwin doesn't know is that without Eliot and Margo, Quentin isn't exactly who she hopes he'll be.





	1. Another Timeline, Slightly to The Left

Jane Chatwin was **not** a failure, thank you very much. (Ignoring, of course, the obvious evidence of her failures littering the floor around her feet). When she set her mind out to do something, she did it. Plain and simple. When she wanted to visit Fillory, she did, even when it locked Martin out all those years ago. When she wanted to stop the Watcherwoman, she did (although becoming the Watcherwoman _may_ have been an extreme measure…) Once, she had even gone an entire month without speaking to either of her brothers because they had told her that one day she would need to start living in the real world and “leave all that fantastical Fillory business behind.” Nothing, absolutely nothing, on either Earth or Fillory, was capable of stopping Jane once she had started.

And yet.

  
And yet, the miraculously pig-headed and impossibly resourceful Jane Chatwin had failed.

She had failed twenty-two times.

Twenty-two timelines, each slightly different from the last, as if someone had taken the previous timeline and moved it two inches to the left. Sometimes, she had changed what their disciplines were, or how much time they spent at Brakebills before first encountering The Beast. Other times, she simply changed when they met. And even still, there were times when some of them didn't meet at all.

At first, the changes she made had been quite small. But as timeline after timeline passed by, Jane grew more and more desperate, and took bigger and bigger chances.

  
Of course, there were some things that Jane couldn't change, no matter how hard she tried. Quentin's love of Fillory, for example, had been present in every timeline. And Quentin himself, for that matter. No matter what she changed, Quentin managed to find a way to the Fillory and Further books, and from there he found his way to magic, and from there to spot at Brakebills University.

And when he did, he found his way to The Beast. And he fought. In every timeline, in every iteration, no matter what else or who else Jane had changed, Quentin Makepeace Coldwater fought for the fate of Fillory.

It was odd, she thought as she looked down at his blank, lifeless expression, that someone so ordinary could find themselves in the middle of something so extraordinary so often. He was like a volunteer tomato; always ready to stand up and fight for what he loved, even when it wasn’t asked of him. That was what she liked about him. He was never the most talented or useful of her little magicians, never the actual hero of the story, but at least he was always _there_. He was the heart of every group that Jane had created.

But even his tenacious compassion and unwavering love were unable to save him and the others, unable to comfort her when she thought of her twenty-two failures. Of the twenty-two times she had manipulated together a group of promising magicians in an attempt to stop The Beast, only to see them viciously torn apart at the hand of the thing that used to be her brother. Nothing, either on Earth or in Fillory, was capable of comforting her when saw the proof of her failures in the form of her dead magicians scattered at her feet like confetti. 

Jane Chatwin had failed. Jane Chatwin had failed twenty-two times.

She promised herself that she would not fail a twenty-third.

The change this time would be simple. In timeline twenty-two, everything began to fall apart because Julia and Alice became too concerned with competing with one another and showing off to bother focusing on the more pressing issue at hand. The solution was obvious; she would place both of them in a relationship with another of her magicians in an attempt to place a buffer between the two brilliant young ladies.

Julia would be placed with Penny as they would both melt the other’s occasionally heartless facade (and because Julia could not possibly be paired with Quentin or Eliot, and Jane was far too tired to attempt to add a new variable in at this point in time); and Alice with Quentin, as their similar awkward natures would allow them to be as comfortable around each other as they were capable of being, and because Quentin’s empathetic heart would balance out Alice’s far more ruthless head.

This new iteration, however, left no room for Kady, or Margo and Eliot, whose presence would only create tension between the couples, thereby destroying the perfect equilibrium Jane had set out to create.

That was just fine. Julia and Alice were leaps and bounds ahead of the others as magicians; Penny was obviously invaluable as a Traveler; and Quentin, of course, was her dear volunteer tomato, whom she couldn’t part from, even if she had wanted to. Hopefully, the four would be more than enough to get the job done.

The others, while occasionally helpful, were simply not as necessary as the four above. If erasing their friendships was what was needed to finally stop Martin, then that was exactly what she would do.

This will be the timeline, she thought to herself as she stepped over the mangled bodies of timeline twenty-two and prepared to reset the loop.

This will be the timeline in which The Beast finally dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I've read pretty much every piece of Magicians fanfiction on this site, so I decided to create some more. I know it's a bit short, but my plan is pretty much to completely write out my version of what happened in Timeline 23, including what we saw during season 3. This is the first time I've ever written any sort of fanfiction, so please be kind about it, and if you could, give me a bit of feedback. :)


	2. The Boy Behind the Veil

It was Saturday afternoon, and Quentin Coldwater was in bed. Now, this was not an odd occurrence for him. You see, every once in a while, he would have a day, or a week, where he just seemed to… shut off. When that pesky little voice in the back of his head grew too loud to be drowned out by rereading The World in the Walls, or when that constant, vaguely empty feeling in his chest started to consume him, or when when for no reason at all, everything would start to feel wrong, like he was watching his life from behind some unseeable veil. When these episodes hit him, he would just lay down, and stop. As if he hoped that stopping could somehow freeze time, and with it, all the things that plagued him.

  
Depression, the doctors called it, when he had first been hospitalized when he was sixteen, unable to move, or think, or see in colors that weren’t muted. Severe clinical depression. One and half weeks, several prescriptions, and a few half-truths later, Quentin had been released back into the real world.

  
Seven years later, and his brain would still break from time to time. He was never quite able to fix it, never capable of stopping an episode from happening, but he did figure out how to hide it, and how to survive through them. And so, for seven years after his official diagnosis, Quentin Coldwater went through his life doing his best to pretend everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.

  
On this particular Saturday afternoon, Quentin was facing one of those inescapable episodes he would occasionally have. And like many of the other times, he was currently curled under a warm, heavy blanket on a bed, staring blankly at the wall and trying to think of anything other than the black hole that seemed to have replaced any sort of a soul he may have once had. However, unlike those other times, this was not his wall, his blanket, or his bed. These walls, blanket, and bed belonged to none other than Midtown Mental Health Clinic.

Things had gotten bad again. Not just bad, though. Things were always just bad.

This time, “bad” was worse than usual.

This time, though, felt more like the first time, when he had first been hospitalized. And Quentin was tired of just dealing. So he had checked himself in, and waited for something to happen, for him to somehow, magically get better. And he waited.

And then he remembered that he lived in the real world.

And then he remembered that ,in the real world, there were no magical solutions for him to wait around for.

Sunday afternoon, Quentin wasn’t in a bed. Instead he was sitting in a chair in the office of one Doctor Jennifer London, looking out over the water, or down out his hands, or at the books on the shelf behind her head. In short, he was doing everything he could to avoid eye contact. Eye contact, he found, was distracting. It never ended well for him - typically with someone asking “are you okay?” and “oh, how can I help?” - and just made him feel even more anxious because he was well aware of how unreasonable it was to be constantly feeling like this. To calm himself, he did a magic trick. She noticed.

“Wow. Nice trick. Well, I'm sure you're a hit at parties,” she said encouragingly as she opened his file and quickly reviewed it. Quentin gently scoffed.  
She put the file down and clasped her carefully manicured hands, leaned back, and looked across the desk at him. “So... you think you're ready.”

A quick nod. “I do.” She cocked her head at him, much like a child regarding a particularly interesting exhibit at the zoo. This was what he hated about places like this. They tried to help, they really did, but manufactured concern wasn’t helpful. It felt too much like pity, and pity inspired shame, and that, that was almost worse than the depression itself.

“Why?” She pressed.

Quentin searched for the words to explain. But how could he say that he knew that being here, seeking help, was pointless without sounding suicidal? How could he explain that he knew that this was just his life, and that he had to suck it up and find some other way to deal? Instead he just shrugged out, “I feel... better.”

She raised her eyebrows, and leaned forward. “Hmm.” She opened his file once again, and read a section aloud. “On admitting, you reported you couldn't concentrate, eat, get out of bed. You said the feeling of not belonging anywhere was overwhelming. And that you were the most useless person who ever lived. And now... you feel better?”

Another nod. Better was one word for it. Not necessarily his word, but a word nonetheless. But, better was also the only word that would get him out of here, so yeah, he was “better,” whatever that was supposed to mean. “I mean, I get it.”

“Get...?”

“You're a kid, and your whole life is ahead of you, and you have these notions... about what life is... and... what it could be. But eventually you have to let all that go. So that's what I'm-- that's what I'm going to do. That's what I'm doing. Um, it's a part of growing up-- you know, selling the comic-book collection and getting serious.” This was his life. This was his life. This was his life.

Nothing was going to change that.

“You graduate soon. And then?”

And then the “real world.” And then he was to continue being a functioning member of society. And then he was supposed to get his life together. “I'm supposed to have a grad-school interview on Tuesday - Yale.”

She frowned. “Quentin, I'd really recommend further treatment.”

But what was the point? More treatment wasn’t going to fix him. It wasn’t going to make him something he wasn’t, wasn’t going to make his life something more than it was.

He had to accept that this was his life. Quentin had to stop waiting for some storybook life, some big magical reveal, and live in the real world for a change. “Look, I've never threatened to hurt myself or anybody else. So you can't make me stay. Can you?”

And so late Sunday afternoon, Quentin Coldwater wasn’t in bed or in an office, but walking towards his apartment, trading in the drab gray walls of the Midtown Mental Health Clinic for the drab gray buildings and sky of New York.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯  
> find me on tumblr @margosaxes


End file.
